Composition Pedagogy: Short Survey

We’ve lost a fair number of important composer-teachers in the last year, and some of the postings and comments by former students have been wonderful and poignant tributes. It seems appropriate to send this REQUEST to any current or former composition student who studied with any teacher(s), living or gone:

Please send me 1-2 things that were of greatest value to you in your composition studies.

Thanks to everyone. I’ll compile these and post the results. Composition teaching is not well understood, even by the students and teachers themselves. Together, perhaps we can shine some light on the most inspirational methods.

I heard Pierre Boulez once said education should be short and painful. Louis Andriessen said add wrong notes and kill your darlings. I’d say write as much as you can and learn from what you hear of yourself.

“There’s a time for input and a time for output” — Claude Baker. (Implication being — if you find yourself stuck at any stage of a composition, it’s time to do some listening.)
“Studying composition in college is a time to jump off cliffs and take a lot of risks. Better to fail here than on the great American stage where the critics are watching.” — possibly Don Freund, although it could have been any of my teachers.

First. My greatest teacher, Gerald Kemner, wasn’t just my teacher. He was my mentor who taught me the craft of music composition while also teaching me how to interact with life, performers and conductors. When I mention this to other former students of Kemner they all respond the same way: “No. He was MY mentor.” Studying composing is unlike any other system of education in that it is the last remnant of a Master/apprentice mode of learning. You can go to a Biology lecture with 100 other students and hide, never to be observed or taught. When you sit at a piano alone with your Master there is nowhere to hide. This is good and the most challenging and creative learning environment possible. My 2nd comment is that music composition students must acknowledge and appreciate that, when they are in college, they can walk down the hall and find a string quartet, orchestra, harpist, or woodwind/brass player with no effort. That luxury ends as soon as you graduate.

Things from my main composition teachers, which forever changed me as a composer —
Bernard Rands: “This can become that.”
Stephen Hartke: “Can you just leave the Bible out of your music for once?”
Peter Lieuwen: “Coming up with a ‘good’ musical idea is easy. That’s something you just take for granted. The difference between a ‘good piece’ and a ‘great piece’ often has nothing to do with the quality of the musical ideas, but how you animate them.”
Allyson Brown Applebaum (my first composition teacher) taught me the value — nay, the necessity — of making your scores *look* great. You can be the next Stravinsky or Beethoven, but if you’re music doesn’t look absolutely professional and publisher-ready, nobody is going to play it.

Mario Davidovsky: To much to distill down to a blurb. We spent the first 45 minutes of every lesson talking about politics, theology/religion, philosophy, culture, and literature. But that was EXACTLY what I needed when I studied with him. It was all *composition*. It was all directly relevant to being not just a “composer,” but a creative artist, and — more importantly — a good human being.

I studied with jazz composers, who tend to strictly teach craft and give very little creative guidance (assuming, I suppose, you’d get that as a jazz improviser). But I did get some good quotes.
Hank Levy: “You have to stick your neck out every time you write a note on paper.” “The only things you have to work with are lights and darks.”
Bill Dobbins: (pointing to one particular dot on an oversized page containing thousands of dots) “Why is this note here? Where did it come from?” – i.e. stressing unity in all compositional materials. Often my answer, in my first year or so, was basically “nowhere I can point to”. I don’t necessarily hold to that kind of rigor now, but I am very conscious of exactly how I’m using all the elements I’m working with at a given time.

My composition teacher, the Argentinian/Italian Eduardo Bértola always adviced me: “Treat very well the musicians playing your compositions, and above all give them clean and accurate manuscripts of your music!